§ 220. General Survey

Christ’s Church is one in the world, and she alone is appointed to exist until the end of the ages, and to direct the will of all people according to the will of God, and to bring them all into God’s Kingdom. Accordingly, Christ’s Church has the character of a necessity in the world, and exists by God’s ordination in order to carry out the task which her own Founder assigned to her in the world, and that task is that all people should become Christians. In carrying out this task, the Church must come into contact, in the first place, with the state, and then with all those religious societies that are outside her communion. From this arise the established legal relations between the Church, on the one side, and the state and various heterodox societies on the other—which, in the various systems of church law, are designated as the external law of the Church, as distinct from the legal relations that exist within the Church with regard to her own members, which is called the internal law of the Church.

The teaching on the legal relations of the Church to the state is of particular importance when one takes into account that complete order and peace cannot be conceived where the juridical sphere of various persons—above all of various societies—is not properly determined, and when, besides this, one considers the harmful consequences for society that have occurred, and do occur, when the relations between Church and state are left undetermined, and when one authority, ecclesiastical or civil, oversteps the bounds of its own competence. Equally important is the teaching on the relations of the Church to the heterodox, when one considers the great multitude of various heterodox that still exist today in the world, all of whom are called to confess the true faith of Christ, and toward whom the Church must hold strictly to the law of Christian love, while at the same time striving that all may become one in Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER ONE. The Church and the State.